Yannick Murphy - The Call

ACTION:I wrote the wife a note. I told her where I was going, just to visit my son. I got in my truck and drove and I took it as a good sign that throughout the whole way, my CHECK ENGINE light never came on. When I got to the hospital, I saw that he looked like he had lost weight. The cleft in his chin I thought looked shallower somehow, as if once it could fit a whole green pea but now could only fit the half of one, a split one. There were many forms to fill out. I filled them out in the waiting room, using a magazine for support. The front of the magazine had a picture of a covered bridge that was not far from my home, that was not far, in fact, from the imprisoned zebra.

RESULT:It was no use, leaving my wife a note like that. She was onto me fast. I had her speak to the doctor I was assigned. I had him reassure her I would be all right. My wife, while crying, wanted to know about the calls, how she should handle them. I told her over the phone that there was not much to do, considering the small number of calls I had been having, but that there was one thing I’d like her to do and that would be to drive Dorothy and Alice to the doctor’s on Thursday. Who are Dorothy and Alice? my wife asked, and why do I have to drive them to the doctor’s? Just as a favor, I said. You’ll like them, they’re both very nice old ladies, I said. There were antigen tests and the spaceman was right. He and I were a perfect match. It didn’t seem to matter about my levels being high if I donated a kidney. They weren’t a concern to my doctor in this hospital. He pooh-poohed my levels. He shrugged. He said tests like that these days for levels caused the patient more worry than did the patient good. I liked this doctor. He wore a white lab coat, but he did not wear the breast cancer pins. He also wore a fishing cap, with a feathery fishing fly attached to it, but the metal hook had been removed. He wanted to know what I caught up where I lived. Was it brookies? Was it bass? I liked this doctor because he let me know he knew about other things than being a doctor. He knew about fish, about walleye. His answers were made from a broad spectrum of information he had gleaned from doing so many different things and having so many different interests over the years. I asked him if he’d recently read what I had read, that maybe the dinosaurs never disappeared, but they’re still here. They’re just chickens and other birds now. They’ve just evolved. The doctor thought that sounded reasonable to him. He considered the wrinkled wattle on the turkey. He considered the scaly appearance of chicken feet. I wished he were my doctor at home. I looked out the hospital window at the people walking in the streets and realized that looking out the window I saw more people in one minute than I would see in an entire day at home.

WHAT THE FATHER WHO WAS MARRIED TO HIS MOTHER SAID WHEN HE SAW ME:Thank you. His eyes were filled with tears even before he reached my bedside. He grabbed my hand, he was so thankful I was going to give his son a kidney. I could tell by his handshake that he was not a good match for my son. His was not a strong hand that could stay cupped, pushing water aside in order to swim fast. There was no close blood match or antigen match here.

WHAT THE MOTHER SAID WHEN SHE SAW ME:I told Mark years ago not to contact you. I told him that we should protect your privacy, but now I’m glad he didn’t listen. Is that what you’re like, too, do you not listen to what your mother or your wife tells you to do? That’s not something you wrote down on your application when I considered you for your DNA, she said with a smile. I also smiled, thinking how she was right. I don’t listen. I didn’t listen to the wife when she told me not to come here, told me not to give up one of my organs.

WHAT THE HOSPITAL COOKED FOR DINNER:Meat loaf with tan-colored gravy.

WHAT THE SPACEMAN COULDN’T EAT:The meat loaf or the tan-colored gravy. He had to eat a low-sodium, low-protein diet before the surgery.

WHAT MIA SAID TO ME ON THE PHONE WHEN I CALLED HOME:Poppy, I have lost another tooth and now there is an L in my mouth, see, she said. But I could not see, I could imagine her tilting her head sideways, while still holding the phone, to show me how the spaces in her mouth formed the L.

WHAT THE SURGERY WAS:A laparoscopic nephrectomy.

WHAT I DIDN’T WANT TO THINK OF WHEN I WAS GOING UNDER:If I would ever come up.

WHAT I THOUGHT OF WHEN I WAS GOING UNDER:The yellow junko I had seen in my birch tree in the front yard before I drove down to the hospital. Spring is almost here, I thought. I thought if the ground was still frozen and what the temperature of the soil was, as I wanted to get my seeds in early, my fingerlings started, our growing season is so short. I wondered if I could use my rectal thermometer that I used on my horses to insert into the soil to take the temperature. I figured I could.

WHAT I WAS SURPRISED TO SEE WHEN I WOKE UP:That the spaceman wasn’t next to me in the room. Wasn’t my side just split open and didn’t I just give him a part of me, and shouldn’t we be close to one another, wouldn’t that make the acceptance of my kidney into his body that much easier? Weren’t we like Siamese twins now, and separation would be traumatic? Maybe my body needed to be close to my kidney, and close to the new body it now lived in. Then I realized it was just the spaceman I wanted to be close to. I wanted to know if my son was all right.

WHERE THE SPACEMAN WAS:Down the hall. They wanted us walking up and about as soon as possible. They figured we would be more likely to do so if we had to walk a ways to visit each other.

WHAT I SWEAR BY:Morphine.

WHAT THE SPACEMAN SAID HE SWORE BY WHEN I TRUNDLED DOWN THE HALL WITH A WALKER TO VISIT HIM:Morphine.

WHAT THE SPACEMAN WAS HOLDING UP:A bag of urine my new kidney in his body had produced. He was very happy, as he had not produced his own urine for a while now. Through his bag of yellow urine I could see out the hospital window. I could see trees in a small park and the trees looked anemic and looked as though the branches could barely carry the weight of the fat squirrels who were fed peanuts by the lonely old men on park benches and did not look like our svelte squirrels who had to gather their food. I thought of Arlo, who said he never left his home because he didn’t want to see other places’ trees, and now I knew what he meant and I longed for my own trees, and the view of the trees I had on the hillside beyond the pond.

HOW MANY DAYS I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL BEFORE MY WIFE TOOK THE TRAIN DOWN TO DRIVE ME HOME:Four.

WHAT I SAID TO THE SPACEMAN BEFORE I LEFT:Good luck, take good care of my kidney. I will, said the spaceman. Come visit us if you can, if we are still living where we are living and haven’t moved off the grid to a small house in the thick of the woods to avoid paying high taxes, I said.

Don’t move, he said. I like your house.

You don’t really have to visit if you don’t want to, I said, and I meant it. I didn’t want him to have to think that he should have to visit me. I did tell him though that turkey season was coming on and that we didn’t have a blind, just camo clothing he could borrow and a shotgun that was once my father’s that we could wrap in camo masking tape. I said, Come visit in the fall, not in the spring. I’m not keen to hunt in spring turkey season as I believe the turkeys don’t taste good then, after a long winter with little to feed on. Come visit in the fall, when the turkeys would have had time to fatten up, I said.